The View from the Cheap Seats

There were authors grumbling about not going to the Oscars. I heard about it from friends. “So why are you going?” they asked.

I had written a book called Coraline, which director Henry Selick had transformed into a stop-motion wonderland. I’d helped Henry as much as I could through the process of turning something from a book into a film. I had endorsed the film, encouraged people to see it, mugged with buttons on an Internet trailer. I had also written a fifteen-second sequence for the Oscars, in which Coraline told an interviewer what winning an Oscar would do for her. I’d assumed that this would get me into the Oscars. It didn’t. But Henry, as director, had tickets, and could decide where they would go, and one of them went to me.

My father had died on March 7, 2009. The Oscars are March 7, 2010. I expect that it will just be another day, and it will not bother me at all, demonstrating that I do not know myself very well, because when the day arrives I am melancholy, and do not want to go to the Oscars. I want to be at home, walking in the woods with my dog, and if I could simply press a button and be there without disappointing anybody, I would.

I get dressed. A designer named Kambriel, whom I met when she had made a dress that would allow my fiancée and Jason Webley to represent conjoined twins, had offered to dress me for the Oscars, and I took her up on it. She made me a jacket and a waistcoat, and I fancy that I look pretty good in them. Best of all, I now have an answer to the people who ask “What are you wearing to the Oscars?” And it makes Kambriel amazingly happy.

Focus Features, who distributed Coraline, are looking after me. The previous night they had a small reception at the Chateau Marmont for their two Oscar nominees, Coraline and A Serious Man. The partygoers were a strange mash-up of Minneapolis Jews and animators. Even more oddly, I was one of the Minneapolis Jews (or almost. I wound up comparing notes with one of the other partygoers on the St. Paul paper’s pulse-pounding exposé that I actually live an hour away from Minneapolis).

The best thing about the Oscars, I realized when the nominees were announced, is that Coraline won’t win. In the year that Up is nominated for Best Picture, which obviously, it won’t win, nothing but Up can win Best Animated Picture.

A limo picks me up at three p.m. and we drive to the Oscars. It’s a slow drive: streets are closed off. The last civilians we see are standing on a street corner holding placards telling me that God Hates Fags, that the recent Earthquakes are God’s Special Way of Hating Fags, and that the Jews Stole something, but I can’t see what, as another placard is in the way.